by Rick Partlow
The command center, which was a fancy-sounding name for what was essentially a three-story office building, was a hundred yards across the compound on the other side of the warehouse. We curved around the wreckage, letting two squads of Rangers cover our rear approach, and I thought I could hear the roar of jet engines coming in for a landing, but the building was between us and the landing zone and I couldn’t be sure.
“Contact, right!”
I didn’t know who said it. I didn’t recognize the voice, so it wasn’t Quinn or Landry or Platoon Sergeant Kim. The messenger wasn’t as important as the message. The Chernobog forces were streaming out of the command center like hornets from a nest, and I received sudden and dramatic confirmation that our intelligence reports had been unfortunately accurate.
They were wearing powered armor.
It wasn’t as advanced as our Svalinns, probably because they hadn’t had Helta engineers hanging around to brainstorm with every time they ran into a problem. The edges were rough, the look clunky and kludged-together, with pistons running off the major joints under jury-rigged armored collars. They also lacked our KE rifles, thank God, though I’m sure they would have found a way to steal the design eventually. Being Russian, they’d gone a simpler way, mounting 12.7mm heavy machine guns and recoilless rifles on gimbals attached to their backpacks. It was a system with drawbacks, the primary one being that it would be impossible to fire the weapons from the prone, but it had the typical Russian virtues of being big, cheap and powerful.
Those virtues were easy to appreciate with machine gun rounds the size of my little finger zipping through the air around us. A sledgehammer smacked into my right shoulder and I stumbled, cursing reflexively and hunting for a target. The round hadn’t quite penetrated, but it had been a close thing. I fired by instinct into the middle of the line of charging mercenaries, the whole battle like some absurd 18th-Century engagement where troops rushed across the battlefield at each other, counting on luck and bad aim for survival.
Not that there was much choice for either side. The Chernobog mercenaries had to know that the walls of their buildings were only temporary shelter. They’d lost air superiority and they had nothing to match the firepower of our shuttles, so staying inside just meant dying in the burning rubble. As for us…we had to get inside that building before they had time to scrub their hard drives.
The gunfire sounded odd to me after more than a year of facing laser weapons on starships and space stations and alien worlds, lending an unpleasant air of reality and immediacy to the confrontation. My M900 butted hard against my shoulder, a kick I could feel even through the armor, and a bulky, awkward suit of Russian armor tumbled sideways, the pencil-thick hole punched through its chest plate seeming minor and unimpressive. I knew the truth, though, had seen it in the aftermath of combat. The round had been traveling at ten thousand feet per second, and when it passed through a human torso, it turned everything its wake into jelly. What was left of the Russian’s internal organs could have been poured into a bucket, and the extra armor hadn’t done more than slow it down a thousand feet per second.
Which wasn’t a knock on their armor, since ours wouldn’t have done any better. It was unnerving seeing proof of that played out before my eyes as one after another of the mercenaries dropped to our gunfire, and I uttered a silent prayer to an agnostic’s God that we wouldn’t have to face anyone else with the technology, even though I knew it was inevitable in the long run.
The gun battle was the work of ten seconds, fifteen at the most. Confusion and chaos stretched time, perception fraying in the chest-deep thump of heavy machine guns, the cacophony of recoilless rifles discharging, the kettledrum roll of exploding shells. Men and women were wounded, dying, dead, and not all of them were the enemy. I wanted to pull the Russians out of their armor and berate them before they died, to ask them why, when we’d finally encountered something beyond ourselves, they were still grubbing for pennies on the ground. But I knew what they’d say if they could answer: this was how it had always been and this was how it would always be. They were Russians. Jambo told me once that the definition of fatalistic in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary was in Russian.
They might have won. They outnumbered us, and despite the disparity of our weapons, quantity, as Stalin said, has a quality all its own. But the tide turned when a firehose spray of tungsten slugs ripped into the Chernobog forces from their opposite flank. The other shuttle had landed and two platoons of Rangers had circled around the burning warehouse to catch the mercenaries in a crossfire.
KE gunfire shifted the corpses from one side to the other, but nothing moved of its own accord, and I thought it was over until a machine gun barrel crashed through a window on the top floor of the office building and erupted with a deep-throated report. At least a half a dozen KE rifles returned fire and the window disappeared along with about six square feet of the wall around it.
“Pops,” I yelled. “Hit the door!”
“Dog,” Pops ordered, “Preacher, take it out. Ringo, you’re on point.”
Those weren’t their real names, of course. It wasn’t code, and had nothing to do with operational security, it was just their nicknames. No one picked their own nickname, either, and if someone transferred onto the team, keeping their old nickname wasn’t a sure thing. You earned it, either by what you did or who you were. Preacher and Ringo were new, replacements for casualties from our last mission, and it was a little unusual for them to have nicknames this early in their tenure, but Pops knew Ringo from way back and had given him a pass. And Preacher…well, sitting down next to the man for an hour and hearing him extol the virtues of CrossFit was enough explanation for his nom de guerre.
The double doors that were the front entrance of the office building were solid, reinforced steel, probably sturdy enough that we couldn’t take it down with a doorbuster round from a twelve gauge or a man-portable battering ram. Lucky for us, we had something a bit more energetic. Dog and Preacher had their KE guns set for full-auto. The velocity of the rounds dialed back in exchange for a higher rate of fire, and they stitched a double line up the inside of both doors, blowing fist-size holes through the thick metal with each impact.
The doors swung open under the barrage of slugs and Ringo sprinted inside, firing as he went, with Dog and Preacher at his heels. I was right behind them, not because I felt the need to prove anything but because this was a snatch-and-grab mission and it was my responsibility to make sure no one got froggy and put a round through Lermontov.
Someone had made the mistake of standing too close to the doors, and he’d paid for it with his life, catching three or four rounds through the torso. His face was mostly intact and it wasn’t our target, so I kicked his AK clear of his body, left him for the Rangers to identify and pushed ahead. What had been a reception desk when this place was an office park was a security barrier now, for when Chernobog brought potential clients in to talk business, I suppose. They made most of their money working for Popov, but that didn’t mean they’d turn down a payday if they could get the job approved by the Russian government. The barrier was constructed of bulletproof plexiglass, but no one had been stupid enough to try to hide behind it.
Beyond the barrier were three ancient, metal desks with ancient computer monitors that had to be as old as Corporal Quinn, and past those, in the left hand corner, was a staircase heading to the upper stories. Preacher and Dog were covering it. Ringo was across the room, looking through a doorway down another set of steps, these going down to the basement.
“Up or down, boss?” Dog asked me, motioning with the finger of his off hand between the two stairways.
“Pops,” I said, looking back over my shoulder in an instinct I couldn’t break even after so many months wearing the armor, “I’m taking Preacher, Dog, Scooter and Ringo to the basement to secure the servers. You take the rest of the team upstairs and get Lermontov if he’s there.”
“Yeah,” the older man drawled, clomping past me to the st
aircase, “don’t think I don’t know you’re taking the basement because you think that’s where Lermontov is.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Tremonti,” I said archly, trying to sound serious but not quite pulling it off. “Dog, you’re on point.”
“I hate stairs,” Dog admitted. He yanked a flash-bang off his vest, thumbed out the pin with a motion that would never have worked without the enhanced musculature of the suit, and tossed it down the stairs. “Fire in the hole,” he added belatedly, just before the concussion grenade exploded somewhere twenty yards below us.
The thunderclap of the blast was still echoing when he jumped with a screeching battle cry wasted on the rest of us since no one could hear it through his helmet. Preacher and Ringo scrambled down the stairs behind him, mostly, I think, because they wanted to beat me to it, but I managed to get ahead of Scooter. I’d barely made it through the door before I heard gunfire from below and knew I’d made the right choice.
Preacher left a man-shaped indentation in the wall on the landing, smashing into the sheetrock with his armored shoulder to arrest his descent and scramble down the second flight of steps, but Ringo slowed down the more conventional way, which meant he was going slow enough to take a burst of machine gun fire in the chest. It didn’t penetrate, but the impact was enough to send him stumbling backwards, off-balance, into Scooter’s path behind me, and I did something very stupid and launched myself down the stairs past him.
So many bad things could have happened in the long second it took me to hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, from getting shot to slipping and breaking an expensive part in my expensive suit to running straight into the back of one of my own men like a huge fucking idiot. None of them did, because God smiles on the simple-minded. I landed with a whine of overtaxed servomotors between Dog and Preacher crouched at the bottom of the steps, laying down suppressive fire against a doorway at the end of a long hall—a good fifty feet away.
KE rounds were ripping pieces off the wall. They had to have their weapons set at the minimum velocity or they would have simply passed through and killed whatever was on the other side. And I knew it was time to do one more stupid thing.
“Cover me!” I yelled and sprinted for the end of the hall.
The door was on the left, which meant I couldn’t just barrel right through. Svalinn armor is more agile than you’d think but it did bring my cumulative weight to somewhere north of 800 pounds. You don’t just stop on a dime running twenty miles an hour with nearly 600 pounds of metal strapped to your ass. I was thinking fast and trying not to let my body outrun my head. The wall ahead of me was a dead end, but my thermal filters showed neat rows of mechanical heat sources behind it, what I was betting were the power sources for the computer servers. Which meant the wall wasn’t thick and might not be load bearing. This should work.
I sped up and was running about twenty-five miles an hour when I slammed my right shoulder into the wall. It turned out to be sheetrock over cement block and thank God for shoddy, Soviet-era workmanship and lack of supplies, because if there had been rebar through the pour, I would have looked damned silly bouncing off of it.
Instead, I crashed through in a spray of rubble and dust and very nearly ran straight into the barrel of a Kord 12.7mm heavy machine gun. The Chernobog mercenary holding it was wearing their version of powered armor and, up close, it was even more the very model of Russian engineering, rife with bolts and welds and even duct tape in some spots. I grabbed the barrel in my left hand and jammed the muzzle of my KE rifle under his chin. I couldn’t see his face through his visor but he was too short to be Lermontov, so I put a round through his head.
He didn’t fall. His joints locked and held him upright, a metal statue erected to the vanished Russian space age by some modern artist, the back of his helmet ruptured and splattered with blood. Beyond him, the room was swathed in a haze of gun smoke and dust, the blinking lights of dozens of computer servers each wreathed in their own, individual halos. A small man with short, dark hair and glasses was working frantically at a panel and I had a hunch he intended to wipe whatever information was stored here.
I didn’t like shooting an unarmed man, but there was no way I could reach him in time and a bad guy with a computer was just as dangerous as one with a gun. He spun away when the tungsten slug took him in the chest, probably dead before he even knew he’d been hit.
“Are you okay, boss?” Dog asked, scrambling through the door behind me, but I didn’t answer.
The room was maybe thirty yards long and twenty wide, the majority of the space taken up by the servers. I couldn’t see another soul besides the two I’d already killed. But I knew Lermontov was down here somewhere. It was just gut instinct, but an old one. I’d dealt with people like him in Venezuela. Russia hadn’t wanted the country to fall to the United States but they hadn’t wanted to risk open war with us—not with their economy and population so hard hit by the Wuhan Virus not that long before.
They’d sent mercenaries to aid the Venezuelan junta, not Chernobog that time but close enough. Even though they nominally worked for money, they were patriots to the core and there was no way Lermontov would run, which meant he wouldn’t be on the ground floor, where the chance for escape was the greatest. And he wasn’t stupid, so he wouldn’t have gone upstairs where he could be cut off. No, he was down here. He wanted to take those servers out and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have enough charges planted to take down the whole building.
I scanned the walls on thermal. The sides were solid and so was the floor, the only heat coming from power cables running in from the generators. But the back wall…there was a heat source back there. The wall was insulated, so I couldn’t make out what the hot thing was back there, but I was willing to bet it was Russian.
I couldn’t remember making the decision but I was moving. It had worked once and if it ain’t broke, then keep hitting it until it breaks. I used my foot this time because I didn’t need to go tumbling into the hidden room head-first, and it did the job. I’d found the hidden door and it smashed inward, the boards splintering under the sole of my boot, and I was face to face with Yevgeny Lermontov.
He was wearing powered armor but he had his helmet off, revealing the same long, horselike face, etched with the deep lines of every single one of his fifty-six years, his short hair and handlebar mustache shot with grey, his steel-blue eyes burned with the same fanaticism others had seen in the last moments of their lives. A small electronic control was in his left hand, a set of wires in his right, and I wanted to make some droll commentary on the irony of a man in powered armor setting up an explosive charge with a detonation rig from fifty years ago, but this was Russia, so I punched him in the face instead.
The detonator went flying and when Lermontov didn’t, I thought I might have to hit him again, but his eyes were crossed and his mouth was open, blood pouring from his nose. He lost his balance and the armor did as it was told and toppled backwards like a felled tree. The crash was impressive.
Stepping over him, I put the muzzle of my KE rifle in his face, then leaned down and stripped the CZ 9mm from his chest holster.
“Colonel Yevgeny Lermontov,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure if he was conscious or whether he spoke English, “greetings from the United States Marine Corps. You fucked with the wrong people this time, you low-life piece of shit.”
“Boss…” Dog said, standing in the remains of the door. “I want you to know, I say this with all due respect and not a little bit of love…you’re fucking nuts.”
Chapter Three
“This place hasn’t changed one fucking bit.”
I hadn’t meant the words to sound quite so bitter, but there it was.
Caracas. Why the fuck was I in Caracas again? It was a good question, so I went ahead and asked the CIA field officer next to me in the minivan.
“Why the fuck are we in Caracas?”
His name, as far as any of us knew,
was Justin Mansur, and I didn’t like him. It was nothing personal. He was an open-faced, friendly type, ordinary-looking with a widow’s peak and a ready smile, and he hadn’t shown anything but good manners and a civil tone, but I didn’t like spooks.
Maybe it’s the way they always dress the same, a forced casual that never seemed natural to me, or maybe it was that slightly oily way they always agreed with you and tried to make you feel comfortable when you knew they’d fuck you over in a heartbeat if their mission required it and they’d never tell you, not even after the knife had gone in.
He looked away from the shadow-strewn roads of the Catia barrio long enough to cock an eyebrow at me.
“What?” he asked. “You wanted us to do this illegal-as-shit interrogation in Idaho? Or Virginia? The dude’s basically Russian military. And maybe this new alien tech we have can knock down ICBMs, but I sure as hell don’t wanna be the guy who makes us find out the hard way.”
“We kept the Tevynian EPW at the construction station in Lunar orbit,” I reminded him. “No cameras there…and no banditos waiting around the corner to ambush us, either.”
Mansur chuckled, which he might have meant to sound ingratiating but instead seemed dismissive.
“No banditos around here these days,” he insisted. “At least none stupid enough to attack a gringo. Not after President Martijena hung the last few from lampposts with their guts hanging around their ankles.”
“Oh yeah,” Pops murmured from the back seat. “That always does the trick.”
Catia was still a labyrinth out of Dante’s nightmare, narrow, winding streets climbing the hills, the tenements on either side squeezing in, claustrophobic, intimidating. It was worse at night, with streetlights that only worked sporadically, and only then until someone vandalized them. I stared into the darkness and the faces stared back, desperately poor, eternally angry.
